For the most elaborate websites, you should consider a content-management system, or CMS. That’s a mouthful, but it only means software that lets you manage your website content. A good content-management system will let you do everything WordPress can do, and more. A CMS is more general than a blog. The main purpose of a blog is to let you post content day by day, as in a news feed. A CMS can do this, but it can also handle other content, displaying it in a number of ways.

There are a number of alternatives. One popular CMS is Joomla, and DreamHost has a one-click install for it. I prefer Drupal for my websites (also supported by Dreamhost). For example, this website runs on Drupal, as does my main site. Both Joomla and Drupal are free software.

Another example is Gilmore-ism.com, my fan site for the TV show Gilmore Girls. Some of the features on this site are custom-programmed, such as the quotes database. The theme is also highly customized. But most of the features on the site use built-in Drupal features or off-the-shelf Drupal modules.

Consider all the ways Drupal helped me put together this site:

• The front-page dashboard is all based on standard features and off-the-shelf modules. The various lists are either standard blocks available from different modules, or they are custom views of the content on the site.
• The “Random Quote” feature is also a custom view of the content, like the lists on the front page. It’s a view of a single, random quote.
• The “RSS” feature is a feed of front-page content. Like a blog feed, this is a Web 2.0 feature that allows users to get an automatic list of the new content on the site.
• The “Content from Other Sites” feature is Web 2.0 at its finest. It automatically republishes a list of links to select sites that themselves have RSS feeds.
• The “Search” feature is built-into Drupal. It automatically searches all the content on the site. There’s also an off-the-shelf alternative that uses Google search.
• Users can register for a free account on the site and submit comments and certain content. This is a built-in feature, and all I needed to do was to enable it.
• Users can rate articles on the site and get recommended content based on their ratings and the ratings of other users. These features were all in off-the-shelf modules. All I needed to do was to install them.

There are plenty of do-it-yourselfers who install and maintain CMS-based websites, using Drupal, Joomla, and other software. You’ll also find consultants and developers who can provide the features that meet your specialized requirements.

Technorati Tags: